So you might wonder, how does a military that is capable enough to win a war then fail to prepare for the next war? How does a military foolishly prepare to fight the last war?
Behold:
Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, outlined a new U.S. approach to war in a series of speeches this week that replaces overwhelming firepower with more restrained use of force to safeguard civilian lives.
The speeches, delivered at Kansas State University and the Army's Fort Leavenworth, amount to a formal effort on the part of the chairman to codify how a decade of combat is changing the military's understanding of its role in battle and, more broadly, its place in U.S. foreign policy.
"In this type of war, when the objective is not the enemy's defeat but the people's success, less really is more," Mullen said. "Each time an errant bomb or a bomb accurately aimed but against the wrong target kills or hurts civilians, we risk setting our strategy back months, if not years."
Embedded in Mullen's new doctrine is the somewhat controversial notion that troops should assume greater physical risk in order to protect innocent civilians in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. "We protect the innocent," Mullen said. "It is who we are."
We've been fighting two wars where the primary mission is to protect friendly civilians from enemy insurgents and terrorists and we are apparently assuming this is the face of war--period.
We need to be prepared for that old-fashioned type of war where organized units clash with other professional military units in a traditional battle for territory and the destruction of the enemy armed forces. Victor Hanson doesn't assume that big wars are over:
Events of the last half-century seem to have confirmed the notion that decisive battles between two large, highly trained, sophisticated Westernized armies, whether on land or on sea, have become increasingly rare. Pentagon war planners now talk more about counterinsurgency training, winning the hearts and minds of civilian populations, and “smart” interrogation techniques—and less about old-fashioned, “blow-’em-up” hardware (like, say, the F-22 Raptor) that proves so advantageous in fighting conventional set battles. But does this mean that the big battle is indeed on its way to extinction? ...
In short, if the conducive political, economic, and cultural requisites for set battles realign, as they have periodically over the centuries, we will see our own modern version of a Cannae or Shiloh. And these collisions will be frightening as never before.
Indeed. Although in the article he expresses doubt that the Iran-Iraq War had conventional battles. Yes, the Iran-Iraq War had major conventional battles.
Certainly, as long as Iraq and Afghanistan absorb most of our ground resouces, winning the wars we are in take priority over preparing for a conventional war that will come at some point in the future.
But it is a tremendous error to say that current wars define our future universe. We have indeed fought conventional campaigns in our recent history:
So when was Iraq (the post-major combat phase) deemed the most likely type of war we will fight in the future? It seems that it was once a condemnation of the military that they always prepared to fight the last war. And now it is the height of sophisticated analysis to disregard conventional warfare because the Army should assume it will only need to fight more wars like the current one in Iraq?
It was a conventional assault that took down Saddam's army--twice. It was a conventional assault that overthrew Noriega's regime. It was a conventional air assault that compelled Milosevich to capitulate. And a conventional army prepared to invade Serbia marched into Kosovo after that. A conventional force took down the Marxist regime in Grenada. And it was a conventional Army that held the Soviets at bay and kept the North Koreans quiet throughout the Cold War.
It is folly to downgrade preparing for conventional war after we can afford to do so when the burden of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan declines (because the escalation in Afghanistan will not outweight the decline in our Iraq commitment).
It is amusing in a way, that advocates want to prepare for counter-insurgencies since I have doubts that there is much appetite to fight a new COIN campaign any time soon, after the last 9 years of war. And it is mighty convenient that preparing for COIN only means we don't need to spend as much money on expensive weapons systems only needed for conventional war against organized armies, navies, and air forces. These are dangerous ideas.
And even if we do need to prepare only for unconventional warfare, why are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the template? Remember, as I wrote above, these wars have generally been ones where we defended a friendly population against common enemy insurgents and terrorists. In Iraq, this happened only after the Sunni Arabs of Anbar effectively surrendered and defected. Had this not happened, the fight would have gone on far longer in Anbar at much higher levels of intensity until the Iraqis could grind down the insurgency. And in Afghanistan, it has only been true in the areas outside the southern Taliban regions. We are fighting extra gently there in our new offensive because we hope that Pashtuns will abandon their traditional support for the Taliban. If we can, the template of protecting friendly civilians will continue.
But if we can't flip these Pashtuns, we'll have to grab them by the balls and hope their hearts and minds follow (note the Sri Lanka experience). Fighting that type of COIN campaign against a hostile population is way different than the bulk of our experience thus far in two COIN campaigns. So why don't we plan to fight COIN against conquered people? That could be our next war, too, you know.
Have no doubt, we need to prepare for unconventional warfare as we've fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and perhaps as we will fight against hostile populations. But this is something that a good conventionally focused Army can handle as long as the officers are prepared to fight both conventional and irregular wars.
The safest thing to do is prepare a military capable of operating anywhere on the full spectrum of conflict--from training and humanitarian relief all the way to general nuclear war. The next war will surely fall somewhere in that spectrum.
Trying to predict the form of the next war just sets our military up for the charge that it foolishly prepared for the last war. I'm not willing to predict where that next war will fall. And I don't trust anyone to predict where it will fall.
